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fre:ac is a free audio converter and CD ripper with support for various popular formats and encoders. It currently converts between MP3, MP4/M4A, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, AAC, WAV and Bonk formats.

With fre:ac you easily rip your audio CDs to MP3 or WMA files for use with your hardware player or convert files that do not play with other audio software. You can even convert whole music libraries retaining the folder and filename structure.

The integrated CD ripper supports the CDDB/freedb online CD database. It will automatically query song information and write it to ID3v2 or other title information tags.

The integrated CD ripper will convert your audio CDs to files on your hard disk. It supports all of the formats available for regular audio file conversion. fre:ac can query the CDDB/freedb online CD database to find artist and title information prior to ripping. No need to enter track names manually.

fre:ac can be installed on a USB stick or external drive so you can take it with you and use it on any computer. It will also store its configuration files on the portable drive. That way it will always start up with your custom settings.

The MP3, MP4/M4A, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, AAC and Bonk encoders integrated with fre:ac make use of modern multi-core CPUs, so ripping and converting speeds get a real boost. You will save time and get the job done quickly.

fre:ac provides full support for the Unicode character set. That way it can handle not only Latin scripts, but also Japanese, Cyrillic, Arabic or Indian. If you like music from all over the world, you can tag your files correctly.

fre:ac's user interface is designed to be intuitive so you will be able to use the basic features without any trouble. It still offers advanced options when you need them so you will be able to go beyond simple ripping and format conversion using fre:ac.

fre:ac is available for free without any adware or other foul things. However, the project relies on your support to be able to push the development further. If you like this software, please consider making a donation. Click on one of the icons in the donation section to the right to support the fre:ac project with a donation.

Continuous AppImage builds now available

Thursday, 30 May 2019 12:43

The Travis CI system now creates AppImages for every commit to the fre:ac source repository. This means that you can now try the latest changes right after they land in the repository without having to build fre:ac yourself, for example to verify fixes or test new feature additions.

AppImages are distribution independent Linux packages that bundle most dependencies and should work on any modern distribution. To start an AppImage, just make it executable after download and run it:

fre:ac v1.1 Alpha 20190423 has been released and is now available for download!

This release adds support for ripping with more CD drives than there are CPU threads available. So if you have thousands of discs to archive and some spare drives, this is for you.

Other important improvements and fixes in this release are:

Added support for PulseAudio output on Linux

Added support for drag & drop in the tag editor

Improved interoperability of playlist files with VLC

Improved handling of cue sheets referencing multiple files

Fixed crash when showing freedb multi-match dialog

Fixed float samples processing with Core Audio encoder

Fixed MP4 output issues when input and output files are the same

Fixed decoding of 24 bit WMA Lossless files on Windows 10

Fixed several issues handling Opus files

Fixed several stability issues and hangs

Upgrading to the 20190423 release is strongly recommended for users of previous alpha releases. All users of the stable release of fre:ac are encouraged to try this alpha instead. Please report issues on the GitHub issue tracker or by email to support@freac.org.

fre:ac is now also available packaged as an AppImage for Linux systems.

AppImages are self-contained packages that can be downloaded and run on most Linux distributions without the need to install any additional software. Just mark the downloaded AppImage as executable and run it.

fre:ac is now also available as a Snap for Linux systems supporting the Snappy package infrastructure.

This makes fre:ac available in the software directories of many popular Linux distributions and simplifies installation for their users. In most cases, fre:ac will show up with a simple search for freac or audio converter in these directories.